


The Gatekeepers of Arendelle

by Immi



Category: Frozen (2013)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Superheroes/Superpowers, F/F, Incest, Romance, Roommates, Secret Identity, Sibling Incest
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-11-03
Updated: 2014-11-03
Packaged: 2018-02-24 00:35:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,457
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2561528
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Immi/pseuds/Immi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Anna was used to making relationships with zero face-to-face contact work. Doing the whole cape and cowl gig, she figured she'd make a few more. She wasn't expecting her sister to be one of them. Neither was Elsa.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Gatekeepers of Arendelle

**Author's Note:**

> Originally a NaNoWriMo fic, but things happened, and that fell apart.
> 
> Inspiration drawn from Brandon Sanderson's Reckoners series, Tiger & Bunny, and pretty much every other superhero anything I've consumed over the years.

There were great ideas, brilliant ideas—and then there were the absolutely fantastic ideas that needed immediate attention from a needle and thread because someone had made a slight oversight when going over all the possible ways they could go wrong.

Anna didn’t know the first thing about sewing.

She was a little more familiar with gaping holes making wonderful plans blow up, but that didn’t do a whole lot to make her feel better. If anything—and just because half of her face was going numb didn’t mean the rest of her had, so it was probably fair to say she what she was feeling counted as an anything—it made her feel worse.

As it turned out, knowing what clinging to the side of a building did to her tolerance for cold fell straight back into the category of things she wasn’t so knowledgeable about.

Which meant that superhuman sewing skills would really be appreciated right about now. Not her usual first choice, or her second, or anything in the general vicinity of an interest, but at the moment? She could absolutely rock sewing superpowers.

Even though that was possibly a little too specific. And she didn’t think surgers actually got a say in what they ended up with. She’d love to know for sure, but she was pretty well past the point of that happening.

With a rising sense of frustration, Anna watched the man resting on the balcony across from her perch. Standing there. Looming malevolently over the courtyard. Doing absolutely nothing.

She’d barely made it two floors up from her room before he’d stepped out for some air. The cheery lighting that decked the outside of the hotel made it pretty obvious to anyone out and about and looking that there was a human-sized splash of red swinging its way up the levels, so putting an end to the movement had seemed like a good call. An excellent one, since he still hadn’t noticed her. The only problem was that with every second that went by, her resolve to keep it that way started feeling like a less excellent idea.

Maybe she should have taken the elevator. Or changed on the roof. She did need to get faster with slipping the costume on. Practice with slipping out of windows could wait, right?

Except for the part where it sort of couldn’t.

That didn’t do much to make the mutation of the night’s gentle breeze into an onslaught of icy needles any easier to tolerate.

Keeping a tight grip on the bars of the balcony above her head with her left hand, Anna slowly dropped the other down to wrap her cape over her mouth to give herself some shielding. Her core and most of her head were both perfectly warm, from what she could tell, but the chill seeping into her face was getting really, really distracting. If it was going to be like this every night, she might have to make a few costume adjustments.

Ask for a few costume adjustments. There was still that whole sewing issue to get around. And now that she thought about it, the look on her supplier’s face if she tried to get away with some fuzzy cotton muffler instead of using the proper materials would probably be worse than the cold. Negotiating her way around the cape fiasco had put her through more than enough of that for one lifetime, thank you very much.

Anna huffed, the shock of warm air briefly fogging up her goggles. First night on the job, and she was already coming up with things she’d missed.

That wasn’t too much of a surprise, unfortunately, but she still felt a bit cheated. After the hugely unreasonable number of conversations she’d been put through about the different ways this could end badly, with the constant reminders of the physical danger and the illegality of it all, most of the negatives had to have gotten covered somewhere, right? And even if they hadn’t, didn’t being responsible and giving all of this a trial run automatically clear her for smooth sailing? Karmic justice had to apply somewhere.

Only never in the obvious, convenient ways—which was why she was here to begin with—so somehow the cold hadn’t come up after the initial run-through of weather requirements for her suit.

Another sigh. There wasn’t much she could do about it now.

Maybe this would turn out to be a small startup hurdle, and she’d get used to the temperature. Better yet, maybe it was only a problem because she was being forced to sit still. She didn’t want to bundle herself up until she could pass for a sled dog. Of course she cared about doing her best, and if that’s what it took to get her best going, she’d be on board with it, but…

There was just something comforting about having a smiling face around to help you when everything in the world went wrong. Something real. She liked the idea of it.

A certain someone—several, maybe—would tell her she was being overly sentimental, but she didn’t want to think about locking that small bit of friendliness away.

Anna flexed her fingers around the railing keeping her in the air as much as she could, uncomfortably aware of the slight creases wrinkling her gloves.

Her very first nemesis was starting to look twitchy. She reluctantly let her numbed cheeks part ways with her cape so she could slap it back to her shoulders and belt. Its agitated hum against her spine was ignored. Her foe would be vanquished to the warm safety of his room in a minute, two tops. If she didn’t want to find another one, she had to be ready to move. No time to worry about regent fabrics or the muted grip the gloves had landed her with.

If she went with complete honesty, they weren’t actually that bad, and so far the best part of the night was finally having some solid proof that they were at least as dependable as her bare hands, but she was still stuck on wondering why anyone would willingly subject themselves to the horrible creations when they didn’t have to worry about peace and justice’s whole thing about fingerprints and crime scenes.

Dirt was her running theory.

The man made the shift from twitchy to moving, taking a moment or two to appreciate the stars and stretch to make her life more difficult, and Anna bit back a shout for joy when he turned back to his room and finally, _finally_ disappeared from view.

For the second time that night, Anna imagined a ref’s starting pistol in her ear.

Bursting into action, she flipped herself on top of the railing and jumped up to the next one in no time at all, and in a bit more than that the cold was forgotten in the adrenaline rush of bouncing up the wall like a reverse slinky.

Unable to help herself and having lost her reason to bother, Anna let the much stronger, but somehow less annoying, wind steal away a delighted peal of laughter as she swung up to the roof, sticking the landing in true 10.0 style.

 _That_ was more like it.

Dancing her way across the roof, she propped her heel up on the edge and took her first overhead view of her new home.

The city below wasn’t really that far below, or she would have picked a different hotel in a heartbeat, but the sharp, clear night air made it so easy to feel like she had the entire world laid out before her. In the dark, the far off streetlights and lit skyscrapers looked like they were mirroring the night sky, filling the ground with stars.

The sky was awake right beneath her feet.

Grinning, Anna spun her head around to see the mountain range her city rested under. Towers of ice winked back at her. She didn’t even need a special lens; they were right there.

The Gates of Arendelle.

She returned the wink with a giddy smile on her face, gawking long enough for the night air to remind her that the cold only went places when she did. With a quick shake, Anna turned back to the sparkling city and started the search for her first landing platform.

With the random patches of ice everywhere, she was probably looking at more than a few bruises in her future, but for now her route stood out as plainly as new fallen snow. …She would, of course, be avoiding the actual snow.

“Okay,” she breathed, “showtime.”

Throwing one last grin at the mountains, Islund’s newest hero launched herself into the night.


End file.
